Good principals key to good schools
Still, the rate of change is nowhere near what’s required to ensure U.S. global leadership or provide students and communities with the opportunities they deserve.
The drama in the struggle over these four reforms has diverted attention from the fifth. That’s dangerous. Neglecting school leadership makes overall reform slower and less effective.Continue Reading
Consider teaching quality. Surveys repeatedly confirm the significance of principals in teachers’ work lives. Good principals recruit and support good teachers. An inept principal can chase a fine teacher from a school or, worse yet, from the field.
While more work is necessary, empirical research shows what you expect: Principals are important contributor to students’ academic achievement. Studies by Robert Marzano and Timothy Waters demonstrate that an effective principal can be one key to boosting student achievement. In other words, such a principal can raise test scores by 10 or 15 percent. The only in-school factor that has a more powerful influence is an effective teacher.
School reformers focus on improving the ability of teachers. That makes sense. Eric Hanushek, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, has found that having an effective teacher for three successive years can propel most low-performing students up to grade level.
But direct intervention to improve nearly four million individuals is a daunting challenge – especially with unions often blocking progress. On the other hand, there are only one-30th as many school principals, each a primary motivator of teachers in his or her school.
We know from every other area of life how important leadership is. We honor and cherish great leaders in areas such as medicine, business, the military, sports, religion and politics.
K-12 education is an outlier from this national consensus. The identification and preparation of school leaders is haphazard, leaving principals without the power to pull levers – like hiring and firing and setting budgets – that help them succeed.
It’s time to move education leadership to center stage.
Is the principal’s office the “silver bullet” that education reform has been waiting for? Well, silver is in fact the most electrically conductive of all metals. So it makes a good metaphor for what a new focus on school leadership can accomplish – charging the other elements of reform with new energy.
James Guthrie is senior fellow and director of education policy students at the George W. Bush Institute and a professor of education at Southern Methodist University. On Sept. 29, the Bush Institute is due to launch the Alliance to Reform Education Leadership, which, when fully operational, is planned as the largest effort to improve school principal performance.
Get reporter alerts
James W. Guthrie